


Souvenirs

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-14
Updated: 2009-02-14
Packaged: 2019-01-19 06:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12405186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: He supposes he should be glad that this imprisonment will only last until death.





	Souvenirs

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

He watches from the window; there's something cold and calculating in the moon's beam. This far north, the moon is huge, pearly white violated by black stripes of Unbreakable bars which, really, he shouldn't have bothered with. Albus should have known that it would be beneath his dignity to escape.

The curves of the moon are softened now; crisp edges are a thing of the past. A few green flashes too many and his sharp eyesight isn't what it once was. In the end, this impending blindness has been helpful to him: the relative clarity of images helps him distinguish between what is real and what is only a memory.

One day, a long, long time ago, he'd researched Horcruxes: a wild, childish thought, until Albus' disparaging words stopped him. But he knows what's coming for Tom Riddle; he can foresee a death without rest, a limbo, forever imprisoned in one's own sin.

He supposes he should be glad that this imprisonment will only last until death.

He'd love to be a fly on his own wall. He's always had a fascination with psychology, with actions and reactions and human emotions, and once that fascination had manifested itself in a haughty pride as the scrawny genius next door practically threw himself at him as he flirted with the girls in the village bar, and once it had manifested itself in tearing apart families and people _(for the greater good)_ and now it has manifested itself in a reflective self-evaluation. His memory is as sharp as ever, even if his grip on reality is fading.

He's been disgustingly textbook, he decides with a derisive sneer. Woken by his own moans, a thousand attempted suicides and refusals of food, a slow descent into something less than human, for a long time he had not washed, had let his once-lustrous golden locks become matted, long and dirty, allowed himself to be infested with lice.

Only one thought could pull him out of the squalid degradation _(he can't admit it to himself)_ : That horrific knowledge that not even a besotted teenage fantasist would want him now.

It all comes back to that summer. He'd once read (once heard, once _believed_ ) that there is a moment in everyone's life that solidifies them; a crystalline instant in which one's personality is forevermore set. The summer of 1899 was his. The heat and sweat, the rolling English countryside, a pair of cornflower-blue eyes following him avidly. Everything in his life has been fixated on those months: the evoking of ideas and thoughts and feelings, the knowledge that everything had turned around and been set straight. Every thought he'd had and decision he'd taken referenced those brief and sinful weeks. Every move he has made since the age of twenty has been watched, somehow, by the spectre of Albus Dumbledore.

He hasn't heard from Albus since the duel, and he's glad of it.

But sometimes he thinks he hears him.

_Sometimes he knows he hears him._

The breath on the back of his neck. The rustle in the shadows. Albus Dumbledore is anything but out of his life.

He hears him whispering in his ear. Black things. Screams, sometimes, and he knows, he _knows_ whose they are and he fights it and he _kills_ the thought stone dead but the screams go on and on and on into the black night.

Sometimes Albus whispers _Avada Kedavra_ , and it shames him that he wishes it were real.

Sometimes the whispers goad him, push him, stretch him taut until he breaks and sobs that he's sorry, he's _sorry_ , _breathe out,_ he's sorry.

Albus has left him nothing but his own mind, his own conscience. He never used to have a guilty conscience.

It's very typically Albus that he's been left no books whatsoever, merely neverending  
paper and ink. Scattered over the room, he is knee-deep in scraps of parchment, layered like rock; history and pressure. Swimming on the stone floor are sheets of thin, neat script: lists of potions ingredients, lists of wand movements, lists of victims.

Further up the lettering begins to sprawl. The parchment is almost entirely black with writing that goes right to the edge, over the page, crossed back over the first lines. The words get closer and closer together: tirades, invectives, diatribes against a cruel and unreasonable world.

And sitting atop these papers are circular scraps, torn into shapes, folded like flowers, the writing in circles or stars, backwards, upside down, contorted and controlled and mixed and confused. Confessions, debates, discussions. Remorse.

And fluttering from the desk, still crisp and new: blotched ink spiders on ripped leaves.  
Blotted and clotted, shapes unlike anything but what they were. _(an eye, a face, a heart)_ Tears. Confusion. _Declarations._

He never used to have a guilty conscience.

Smiling a dark smile, the same one that had silenced all of Europe into submission, he lies back on the cold, hard bed, and he's so far gone that Albus' face appears before him without him even closing his eyes.

Albus wears a slight smile, the one he used to wear when he knew that he was right, that the argument could go round and round and round but sooner or later Gellert would have to bitterly admit defeat.

He'll admit defeat now.


End file.
